One brand that has largely been overlooked in the wider discussion surrounding the aesthetic is Puma. The German sportswear manufacturer released its Thunder Spectra sneaker on April 28. While it would be easy to decry it as yet another entry into the sneaker craze, that would ignore the brand’s important role in the lineage of the trend.

Before chunky sneakers however, Puma was engineering its own pioneering footwear—especially when it came to high fashion design. A partnership lasting over a decade, the work between Puma and Alexander McQueen has been foundational in that it laid the groundwork for fashion’s acceptance of the bulky or conceptual sneaker while pushing the irony of exaggerated proportions and palettes as more than a faux-pas. It was also one of the original collaborations between fashion and sportswear. Despite that, it hasn’t received proper appreciation for its pioneering role in the normalization of “luxury sportswear.”

Conceptual Beginnings

While most of the inspirational cues for the Thunder Spectra are drawn from more recent McQ by Alexander McQueen collaborations, the partnership between Puma and the late British designer was established in 2005. Taken together with the German brand’s collaboration with Japanese designer Mihara Yasuhiro, this period marked Puma’s first foray into fashion-forward footwear.

The inaugural collection, Spring/Summer 2006, was heavily inspired by human anatomy and featured silhouettes called the “Anatomical Vein" (both mid and low cuts) and “My Left Foot”. The latter of which was based on Alexander McQueen’s actual left foot. From a design standpoint, the early McQueen x Puma collections, including Spring/Summer 2006, are best described as being highly-technical and futuristic.

McQueen, a self-described sneakerhead who claimed to own more than 500 pairs, described the partnership as one that married his design philosophy with Puma’s technical capacities to create “totally unique product.” Much of the product was streamlined and sleek, with the emphasis on making fashionable sportswear, rather than turning sportswear into something fashionable.

That may seem like splitting hairs, but consider the actual sneakers. Until 2009, most of the collaborative endeavors featured luxurious takes on classic Puma lifestyle sneakers (not to be confused with engineering a completely new concept or silhouette). Some calf-leather or pony hair here, a deconstructed upper there; McQueen was bringing fashion and luxury to sportswear. In 2009, however, the partnership started to produce what should retroactively be considered a seminal aesthetic for the athleisure movement.

In Spring/Summer 2009, McQueen and Puma unveiled the Ribcage Sport. As the name suggests, the anatomical inspiration from the debut collection was still present, but the silhouette carried much more prevalent sportswear DNA. The shape itself was athletic, rather than casual, and the colorway was a meta-referential nod to traditional running shoe palettes.

The silhouette made an immediate return for the Fall/Winter 2009 collection, but featured a new TPU cage that was UV-sensitive, allowing the upper to have an almost magical technicolor quality. The Ribcage continued to feature among Puma and McQueen collections over the years, with an expanding array of colorways that further examined sportswear’s vibrant aesthetic.

While the Ribcage Sport isn’t found in the new Thunder Spectra’s design language—nor is it a particularly chunky trainer—it did present the athletic aesthetic as fashionable, which was an important development. Furthermore, you’d be hard-pressed to not see similarities between the Ribcage Sport and, say, Balenciaga’s runner, Kiko Kostadinov’s Asics kicks](https://www.grailed.com/drycleanonly/asics-history) or Maison Margiela’s glued-together Fusion 2.0, all hyper-referential takes on athletic footwear.

From Alexander McQueen to McQ

While it’s a stretch to claim that Alexander McQueen and Puma kickstarted a trend almost a decade ahead of its peak, the duo’s claim to being one of the originators of the ironically awkward trainer only grew stronger as the partnership grew older. Despite the Ribcage’s sportier DNA, a full-fledged embrace of sportswear didn’t take place until 2014, when McQ by Alexander McQueen replaced the late designer’s eponymous label as Puma’s collaborative partner.

With McQ, a younger and less directional diffusion line, Puma’s sports-driven identity came to the fore. Yassine Saidi, Director of Global Lifestyle for the German brand told Highsnobiety at the time that the “sports side of things [was] probably the difference between [the] collaborations early on up to [2014], the early ones were trainers designed to fit the brand’s seasonal collection.” The driving force behind McQ x Puma was a desire to “increase the sports element […] to explore technology and sporty fashion,” per McQ’s Andrew Rogers.

What’s amazing about McQ x Puma is that many of the shoes that have released since 2014 wouldn’t be out of place in today’s marketplace. The collaborative endeavor’s most famous product was the Tech Runner, both in high and low cuts. It has served as the main inspiration behind the this year’s Thunder Spectra. Yes, the oversized midsole and complex, layered upper seem prescient of what would come to be the norm in terms of fashionable sneakers, but even the selected color palettes were in line with what adidas and Raf Simons were putting out at the time—and what everybody else is putting out now.

While the Ribcage from Spring/Summer 2009 would sit nicely alongside Balenciaga or Kiko Kostadinov, it was the only silhouette from McQueen and Puma to push that aesthetic at the time. From 2014 onwards, though, the relationship between McQ and the German brand presented a more cohesive selection of silhouettes that complimented the Tech Runner and doubled down on the “sportswear as fashion” ethos. The breadth of the offering is what makes McQ x Puma worthy of recognition as one of the originators of the current sneaker trend.

The Run, the Move and the modified Disc Blaze silhouettes put forth by the collaborative duo were similar to the Tech Runner in terms of color blocking and proportions. The Move Lo was a more layered and less polished sneaker compared to the Tech Runner, but it bears a particularly striking resemblance to the forthcoming Balenciaga trainers. The Run was almost like a hybrid between the Tech Runner and Move silhouettes and the cage was reminiscent of the earlier Ribcage model. The off-white colorway from the Fall/Winter 2014 offering—which really just looked dirty and worn—inspires comparisons to numerous silhouettes and would be spot-on if it were to release today, serving as a forerunner to the aesthetic of Gucci’s Rhyton, Balenciaga’s Triple S, and Maison Margiela’s Fusion.

Failures and Moving Forward

For all of the revisionist praise I’ve just heaped on the McQueen x Puma partnership, it’s important to remember the limited commercial and cultural success of the project. Despite being one of the first “fashion-meet-sportswear” collaborations and pushing brutalist footwear at the same time as Raf Simons and adidas, the Puma project never received the rave reviews or wider acceptance.

Models like the Tech Runner Sandal and Faas never received just praise for their unique and avant-garde aesthetic. Unveiled in 2016, the Tech Runner Sandal took a similar approach to the recently released adidas x Raf Simons Ozweego II Replicant by cutting out pieces of the original Tech Runner Hi silhouette. Unlike the Ozweego, though, it ended up at Wal-Mart. The Faas TR, for its part, enjoyed very limited success in 2016, but was a pioneering model as far as modifiable footwear is concerned and didn’t shy away from its blend of brutalist and straight-up-wacky design—even embracing it as an aesthetic.

The timing of the Thunder Spectra, and its liberal use of design cues from the McQ silhouettes, leads one to assume that Puma saw the chunky trainer trend evolving without the brand receiving recognition for its contribution years earlier and wanted to put something relevant out with a quick turnaround time. That being said, as we’ve outlined, Puma’s entry into the arena isn’t forced or unauthentic. Nike’s attempt to turn the Air Monarch into a lifestyle-fashion sneaker has drawn the ire of Kanye West, while the opinionated rapper has remained mum on the Spectra. While that’s probably mostly due to the rapper’s deep-seated dislike of the Swoosh, it’s also possible that he recognizes both the McQ x Puma legacy and the fact that the Air Monarch has always been a discount, entry-level shoe. We can’t say for certain. Besides, when it comes to the “sneaker wars” Puma always manages to remain under the radar (for better or worse).

If you’re a believer in using the resale market as a barometer for popularity and success, this may finally be the chunky Puma sneaker that breaks through, with prices on the secondary market surpassing $300. Resale prices notwithstanding, the Thunder Spectra is more than a decade in the making and represents what Alexander McQueen and Puma set out to do almost 15 years ago. For true connoisseurs, it’s the crowning achievement of Puma’s longstanding attempt to make sportswear fashionable, rather than fashionable sportswear.